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The Collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-shek Lost China's Civil War Parks M. Coble. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 290 pp. £30.00. US$39.99 (hbk). ISBN 9781009297615
In Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1949 (Stanford University Press, 1984), Lloyd Eastman argued that the Kuomintang lost China's civil war because Chiang Kai-shek, who had concentrated power in his own hands, had constructed a fragile state, unable to withstand the windstorm of the Communist Party's revolution. In his view, Chiang's fiscal policies during the anti-Japanese war and on into the civil war era led to hyperinflation and corruption, which in turn alienated the urban population and fatally compromised the morale and combat effectiveness of the KMT's armies.
The Collapse of Nationalist China revisits the issues of inflation, corruption and Chiang's personal responsibility for the KMT's defeat. As Coble observes, most historians agree that Chiang's fiscal policies led to “relentless government deficits and inflation” and the collapse of China's currency, the fabi. The questions that he seeks to answer are: “what was the impact of the inflationary policy on the political and military situation of Guomindang China in the Civil War era” and “why did this policy persist?” (pp. 8–9). Coble draws on Chiang's diaries, the papers of KMT leaders T.V. Soong and H.H. Kung, and on other newly available primary and recently published secondary sources. This concise and engaging reassessment of Eastman's argument will be of interest to professional historians and accessible to graduate and undergraduate students.
In the introduction Coble places his research in historiographic context, identifies the...